Instead of generating answers, Study Mode asks students questions about what they know.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | SDI Productions/E+/Getty Images
When classes resume this fall, college students will have access to yet another generative artificial intelligence tool marketed as a learning enhancement.
But instead of generating immediate answers, OpenAI’s new Study Mode for ChatGPT acts more like a tutor, firing off questions, hints, self-reflection prompts and quizzes that are tailored to the user and informed by their past chat history. While traditional large language models have raised academic integrity concerns, Study Mode is intended to provide a more active learning experience. It mimics the type of Socratic dialogue students may expect to encounter in a lecture hall and challenges them to draw on information they already know to form their own nuanced analyses of complex questions.
For example, when Inside Higher Ed asked the traditional version of ChatGPT which factors caused the United States Civil War, it immediately responded that the war had “several major causes, most of which revolved around slavery, states’ rights, and economic differences,” and gave more details about each before producing a five-paragraph essay on the topic. Asking Study Mode the same question, however, prompted it to give a brief overview before asking this question: “Would you say the war was fought because of slavery, or about something else like states’ rights or economics? There’s been debate over this, so I’d love to hear your view first. Then I’ll show you how historians analyze it today.”
Study Mode is similar to the Learning Mode that Anthropic launched for its chat bot Claude for Education back in April and the Guided Learning version of Gemini that Google unveiled Wednesday. OpenAI officials say they hope Study Mode will “support deeper learning” among college students.
While teaching and learning experts don’t believe such tools can replace the value faculty relationships and expertise offer students, Study Mode’s release highlights generative AI’s evolving possibilities—and limitations—as a teaching and learning aid. For students who choose to use it instead of asking a traditional LLM for answers, Study Mode offers an on-demand alternative to a human tutor, unbound by scheduling conflicts, payment or feedback delays.
But in an economy where generative AI’s ability to gather and regurgitate information is threatening the future of entry-level office jobs, students will need to understand what they’re trying to get out of their college coursework if they want Study Mode to deliver on its promise to foster deeper learning.
“Over all, it does represent a significant departure from how people are normally encouraged to use generative AI, given that the value proposition of this technology is largely couched in the concept of efficiency, speed and offloading things that are not as important,” said Trey Conatser, assistant provost for teaching and learning at the University of Kentucky and director of UK’s Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning. “But Study Mode actually asks us to stick with it for it to work, take some time to sit with the friction of learning and be patient with the practice and feedback.”
Critical Thinking in Age of AI
The release of Study Mode comes nearly three years after the debut of ChatGPT—and the many other large language models that have followed—set off ongoing concerns among educators that college students’ increased reliance on traditional LLMs to write papers or solve math problems may erode their critical thinking skills.
There’s not yet a consensus on if generative AI helps or hurts critical thinking, but at least two studiespublished in the last year found that adults, including college students, who use LLMs to research and learn about a subject exhibited weaker reasoning and analytical skills. And those may be the exact types of skills the roughly two-thirds who are already using generative AI tools like ChatGPT will need to make Study Mode reach its full potential.
While ChatGPT’s Study Mode is programmed to query students rather than generate answers, the users themselves also need to be prepared to push the LLM to ask deeper, more nuanced questions. At least, that was Conatser’s experience when he tested out Study Mode over the weekend and asked it to help him study for a hypothetical quiz on Romantic poets from 1780 to 1820.
First, the LLM asked him more about his education level and the focus of the quiz. He told it that he’s a college junior whose quiz will focus on historical context and specified that he wanted help studying William Wordsworth’s poem “The Prelude.”
The following conversation, which Conatser shared with Inside Higher Ed, ensued:
Study Mode: Wordsworth described “The Prelude” as “a poem on the growth of my own mind.” What exact subtitle did he eventually attach to the poem that captures this idea?
(Give it a try, and we’ll check your answer before moving on.)
Conatser: That’s not so much what I will need to answer. It will be open book, but I will be asked to provide some interpretations to historical context and literary traditions.
After some more dialogue asking Study Mode to focus on historical context, it generated the following question:
Study Mode: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive …” Based on that word, “bliss,” what general emotion do you think he felt when he first encountered the early French Revolution—excitement, fear or apathy?
Conatser: That seems like an obvious question
Study Mode: Understood—let’s turn up the difficulty. In “The Prelude” (Book X), Wordsworth writes of “how in my heart a dreary weight / Fell, and I turned away …”—a moment that marks his break with the revolution he once celebrated.
Question (one step): Which single, headline-making event in France during 1793 does this passage point to, and why did that event feel like a betrayal of the revolution’s original ideals for many sympathetic British observers?
Although it took some prodding to get the LLM to ask the type of questions Conatser wanted to see, “I’m still in the driver’s seat with Study Mode,” he said. “That’s where students are going to need to be when they’re using it.”
Knowing when to push back against Study Mode when it’s not asking the types of questions that will help students master material will be key to helping them get the most out of its ability to foster critical thinking, Conatser said.
“If someone is going to be totally passive with Study Mode, it may not drive them to where they need to go and they’ll still need to be thinking about how they’re supposed to be studying, what kind of assessment they’re leading up to and what kinds of skills will be more important for that assessment,” he said. “If you don’t know what you don’t know, then you won’t be very effective at using these tools even if they have the types of guardrails that Study Mode has.”
And if a student isn’t motivated to use Study Mode to its full potential, they can prompt it to generate complete answers, just like a traditional LLM, according to Christian Carmody, a senior researcher at the Research Institute for Learning and Development, who also tested it out this week.
“For a current events assignment, I prompted Study Mode right away and told it, ‘Before we engage, I do not want your help with this or [to] encourage me to think through this. I do this on my own another time. I really just want the answers,’” Carmody recalled. “It did exactly that.”
The ability for students to easily manipulate Study Mode could add more pressure to colleges and universities that are facing growing skepticism from students about the value of degrees in the age of AI.
“Students should be able to think about why learning is valuable to them and why they should be able to engage with material in a way that’s challenging and force deep thinking,” he said. “Until a student has that mindset, I’m not confident that they are going to use this study and learning tool in the way it’s intended to be used.”
Credit for prior learning is one strategy colleges and states can employ to expedite adult learners’ progress toward their degrees and promote student success. Past research also shows that students who take advantage of CPL opportunities have higher employment rates and increased earnings after graduation.
But administering CPL can be a challenge, in part because of different departments’ and academic disciplines’ understanding and evaluation of prior experience.
In the most recent episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Colleen Sorensen, Utah Valley University’s director of CPL and student assessment services, about new state legislation requiring credit for prior learning opportunities for students and how her office supports instructors and learners navigating CPL.
An edited version of the podcast appears below.
Colleen Sorensen, director of credit for prior learning and student assessment services
Colleen Sorensen, Utah Valley University
Q: Can you introduce yourself, your work and your institution to our audience?
A: My name is Colleen Sorensen. I’ve been at Utah Valley University located in Orem, Utah, for about 31 years. We’re a pretty large institution; we’re actually the largest in the state of Utah. Our enrollment in fall 2024 was 46,809 students. Now, of that, about 45,000 were undergraduates, just under 1,000 were graduate students, and we actually have a pretty large number of concurrent enrollment students. About 16,000 of our students are working towards adding some college-level work while they’re still in high school, and we’re open enrollment. All of that together makes for a really interesting blend of individuals, from first-generation to returning students to nontraditional who all come together at Utah Valley.
I have the lucky pleasure of working with them in the space of credit for prior learning. I was officially made director [of CPL] in 2022; before that, I’ve been over all of testing services for the institution for about the last 25 years. So I’ve been a part of the credit for prior learning process with exam administration for challenge exams and CLEP and ACT and SAT and standardized assessments and professional licensure assessments. Now I get to work also in the space of making credit for prior learning, instead of it being just a department-run system, to taking that and scaling it and modeling it across the entire institution so that all of our academic departments have access to and support to develop credit for prior learning options.
Q: When you talk about this expansion and scaling of credit for prior learning across the institution, can you share more about how that looks and what that’s meant, in terms of where you started and now the vision moving forward?
A: When I started in this, we had a few areas that were already doing quite a bit of work in this space.
One of the things we value in the state of Utah is service, and so a lot of our students will stop out from college and go serve as missionaries across the world for 18 to 24 months.
During that time, they’re often learning a new language. Then they come back to UVU. Our language department recognized that years ago and put together a credit for prior learning process for those students to earn upwards of 16 credits of language [courses] if they can demonstrate [their skill] through a placement test and a course with a faculty member. If they pass that course, they’ll get up to 16 credits of 1000- to 2000-level language. So that’s been going on for a long time.
In 2019, there was legislation that was passed just before COVID that required all of the public higher ed institutions in the state of Utah to provide credit for prior learning options at a larger scale. So with the pandemic, that kind of put it on the back burner for a while, but in 2022 I started to pick this up as a new assignment.
At first, I met with different department chairs. I don’t know if it was just wrong timing with the pandemic, but it felt like a lot of doors closed to it at that time. But there were a few departments that were like, “Oh, I was one of those nontraditional students. I would like to see more opportunities in this space.”
And so slowly but surely, I started working with a few faculty, a few departments and started building sustainable systems of, how can we assess these students? Because each student is unique in what they bring as an adult learner. It’s not just like, “Let’s open this one program and as long as they have step one, two, three and four, they can award credit.” Each student needs to be looked at very uniquely. So I designed what I call a concierge approach to this process, where students can apply through our credit for prior learning website. We have a small team of students and part-timers and myself who are looking at what the student has provided. We’re prompting them with different things and then we’re reaching out within the academic community at UVU to look at possible matchups for credit for prior learning. So when we started, we only had a few departments that would engage with us, and now up to 75 percent of our academic departments are not just looking at but considering and awarding credit.
This year alone, we’ve awarded almost 6,000 credits to CPL over 1,500 courses. In just six months, we’ve saved students over $1.6 million in tuition. So that’s exciting to me.
Q: You bring up an interesting point with this division of responsibility between your office and then the faculty and the academic role in CPL. We want to ensure that students are actually meeting those learning outcomes and that the credits that we’re awarding them do reflect their experiences. But there can be some tension or a challenge point there when it comes to ensuring that there are these systems set up and making sure that every student is being recognized in the ways that reflect their abilities and their learning.
I wonder if you can talk about building that bridge between your office and these academic departments and how you opened up the conversation to make this a space that’s both trusting but also institutionalized.
A: What’s been really important is for me to establish [is] that I’m here to support academic departments and to ensure that the CPL policy that I’m the steward of is being met, but that the governance happens with the subject matter experts and the departments themselves.
Because the way that the school of business assesses prior learning is going to be very different than the way that dance or the botany lab assesses prior learning. I wanted to make sure that each department chair and subject matter expert understands that they’re in charge of deciding what we assess, how we assess it and when we assess it.
Some departments only look at 4000-level coursework for CPL. Others look at 1000- [and] 2000-level coursework. It’s not my job to tell them how to do that within their area. They’re the ones who know. My job is to support them with [questions such as:] Do we need to bring in a national expert in your area if the department is not feeling confident in doing this yourself? Or to bring in templates for them or trainings for them of how to assess their particular type of coursework?
That’s how I support them and then help them navigate through the whole process so that it’s not left to bureaucracy, red tape of sorts, just to support them all the way through.
Q: CPL can be a very confusing process for the student. Can you talk about how UVU seeks to support students as they navigate the process? One, in understanding that this is available to them and that you can recognize their prior learning, but also, what that process looks like and how they might feel navigating that situation.
A: Some departments have things really well established on their websites. Others do not. And so that’s why we have the CPL office and the CPL website. It’s a basic inquiry; it just asks a few questions to the student of, what are your academic goals? What do you think you might be eligible for and how much involvement do you want from us? Do they want a phone call from one of our CPL concierge support individuals, or do they just want to be sent on their way and take care of it themselves?
We really allow the student to gauge that, but we’re here to support them from inquiry all the way up until the credit is awarded. They can walk into our office, or they can contact us via the website and we’ll help them figure out any part of the process such as, do we just need to connect two individuals together? Do we have a faculty member who might be away and so their request has been sitting in a queue for longer than feels natural or normal to a college student? Or what is the natural process that the department has established?
Some departments will say that they’ll review inquiries during these windows of time and maybe the student didn’t catch that piece of information. We’ll reinforce that for the department to say, “Yes, you’re in the queue. It’s going to get reviewed during XYZ, so just hang tight and if you have any other questions, contact us again.”
We are there to support [students] all the way through. That’s the concierge aspect of it, and we found that to be really valuable, because there’s a lot of moving parts when it comes to credit for prior learning and creative solutions that we might not have thought of.
I’ll get three or four different areas together—I might get an associate dean, an adviser and two subject matter experts in a room together. I’m like, “OK, let’s look at this case. What can we do with what we know and what have we not thought of before? How do we best support the student in their academic goals while still keeping all of our academic rigor required?”
Q: I imagine you play the role of translator sometimes, too—helping the student understand what the department is asking and helping the department understand what the student wants to know—which can be a really needed role. It’s wonderful that you have yourself and your team to help draw those dots and connect the lines and make sure everybody’s working towards the same goal.
A: Yes. I’m setting up working with different departments on, “OK, if they do a challenge exam or they do a portfolio review, can they do a second [attempt]?” There are pros and cons to each, right? We want academic rigor, but also, depending on the area, it’s very contextual per level of course and program.
So for someone who’s going for a very high level of coursework [in CPL], is it a one-time [exam] or do you offer a retake, [giving them] one more time with some feedback, helping the student to be able to speak to the learning outcomes more clearly? I’ve seen departments do it both ways. Some will say, “No, they should either know it or they don’t, or they need to be in the classroom.”
The academic departments will go to their board of trustees and talk about it and have a good conversation of, “How much leeway do we want to give here?” Our policy states that you’re allowed up to one retake or not. Sometimes it works in the benefit [of the student] to have it be an all or nothing. And again, that’s very department and program specific. It’s not my job to tell them what it should or shouldn’t be; they know best.
Q: CPL can be very resource intensive, one, for the institution and the faculty or whoever is assessing the project, and sometimes there’s a fee associated for students. Can you talk about the labor, the time and the resources that go into this work and how you help coordinate that? And how is the institution investing in this work?
A: That is the hottest topic of conversation in this work. We’re a very large institution, the course load of our faculty— Adding this on top of it can feel significant in how much time it takes. This isn’t a quick grading process. To grade a portfolio, or to prepare for an oral interview or to write a challenge exam that needs to be updated on a regular basis, all of that takes faculty time.
At the moment, at our institution, there are small amounts of dollars involved that go back to the department who do the assessments and then the department decides whether they pool that money together or they pay out to their faculty. Often they’ll have a conversation among themselves of what’s the best usage of this and do a collaborative decision. Some it’s to pay the faculty; for others, it’s to help fund something that all of the faculty have agreed to.
Ideally, in our future, we would like to see more fees, smaller out of pocket, less than $100 fees, attached to credit for prior learning assessments. But we don’t have full consensus yet among all ofour leadership, and so that is still to be determined at our institution.
Q: Good luck with that conversation. It’s always fun to enter shared governance conversations, especially when we’re talking about student success and what’s gonna be best for the learner at the end of the day.
As we’re thinking about scaling and institutionalizing CPL across UVU, one thing I wanted to ask about is some of those processes that can be very easy. We’ve talked about language requirements and how students who have come from their missions—that’s a pretty set process and it’s pretty understood and simple to navigate for the student. Are there other processes that you’re looking at or working with departments to streamline how this works and what a student can expect?
A: There’s a few things that we’re doing to help this. One, we’re encouraging every department to have some real estate on their home page, on their website, of CPL options so that students can look very quickly if they’re shopping at two o’clock in the morning and don’t want to wait for a response from one of our team who tend to work more traditional hours. We want websites to be able to cater to that, as well as we want advising conversations to be able to cater to that.
We’re even asking faculty to put CPL options on their syllabi, so that if a student sits down on day one and they’re looking at this course and they’re looking at the topics, they’re looking at the learning outcomes, they’re like, “I already know this.” Wouldn’t it be great to also see, “And here’s a credit for prior learning option that you could challenge this,” that maybe they missed up until this point in advising or on the websites, or maybe they didn’t know to contact the CPL office? The syllabus is also another place of marketing as well as [traditional] marketing, which we attempt to do quite a bit of, that could help the student to recognize that there’s another option here.
Q: If you had to give advice to a peer working in a similar role at a different institution, are there any lessons you’ve learned or insights you would want to pass on in this work and the ways that you’ve been advancing this university goal?
A: Start small, but strategically. Like find a department or a faculty champion who has a clear use case, like a common industry certification or a workforce training pathway and then support them with some tools, some templates, some training. Don’t just tell them, “You got to figure this out.”
Center it on the student experience. Talk with your students, learn what they wish could have happened, because there’s so much that can be done, or that might already be being done. It’s just that this department may not understand what that department is doing.
Something that we did this year for the first time is we hosted a faculty summer institute. It’s a three-week commitment, but it’s one day of being together in person. Faculty had to apply for this, and there were four areas of focus—you needed to have a tangible asset at the end of this. One was to develop a CPL pathway. Another was to embed a credential into a program. Another was experiential learning, and the fourth was a continuing education credit process for those who have finished up and now they just want to add on.
We did offer a stipend to these individuals who were approved to come to this training. We spent the morning in education—we brought in Nan Travers, director of the Center for Leadership in Credential Learning from SUNY Empire State College, who is considered the fairy godmother of all credentialing. She was fabulous—to teach and train our faculty. Then we brought in a statewide person to discuss workforce alignment. Then we had a luncheon and we strategically placed all of the faculty into their area of focus. So seated at my table were faculty all focused on generating a credit for prior learning pathway. We had botany, biotech, psychology, computer science and business accounting. They’re all coming in from different schools within the institution.
We sat together at lunch and then we had an afternoon of working on the projects. So Nan was there, as the expert; she would come around to the tables and discuss things and answer questions. But these faculty got to interact with each other, with people outside of their standard focus, and they loved it. They said, at the end of the day, “I never get to do this. I never get to talk with faculty outside of my own area of focus.” They were passing phone numbers to each other. They were sharing their models and thinking and helping tweak each other’s.
It was such a fun, collaborative experience. And we have 11 new CPL pathways that came out of that one day, and then we gave them another three weeks to work on it. We plan to continue to do that summer after summer. We need funding from our administration to help pay the faculty to do that, but I will advocate to do that again and again. It was so successful.
Q: It’s almost like a CPL incubator, like how they have the student entrepreneurship programs, but for faculty to think about ways to be entrepreneurial in their own field.
A: Yeah and, you know, they said, “Thank you for thinking about me and my needs as the faculty member,” really taking care to be able to answer their questions and help them get over those mental blocks that they were experiencing of, “I don’t know how to address this or this or this.” We took care of all of that that day.
Q: It’s nice to just do it all in one day sometimes, too, right? It’s not an email chain. It’s not a series of meetings—like, we can all just sit in the same room and figure it out all in one go.
A: One thing we’re known for in Utah is we like soda with mix-ins. So we had a little beverage bar for them to go get drinks whenever they wanted, with a cute little mix-in to keep them energized and caffeinated all afternoon.
Q: That’s so fun. So as you’re thinking about this work, what are your goals for the upcoming year? Where do you want this program to go?
A: Yeah. There’s a couple things. One, I would like to get us from 75 percent of departments tapping into CPL to over 90 percent, for starters.
We’ve been hosting at UVU for the last three years a statewide conference. We brought in all the other USHE [Utah System of Higher Education] schools to just share best practices in credit for prior learning and ask things such as: How do we make this work? How do we track the data? How do we compare things and be more inclusive as a whole structure within the state of Utah and have less competition between schools? How do we be more collaborative in this process? So continuing to expand that conference is one thing.
I’m partnering with another school, Salt Lake Community College, starting this fall to do a once-a-month lunch and learn hourlong best practices over the phone. Covering, “Hey, what’s keeping you up at night? What are your headaches? How have you solved this?” Just allowing everyone to learn together, because we’re all pretty new, since this legislative mandate in 2019, of really bringing this into fruition. And how do we not reinvent the wheel, but just learn from each other?
Those are a few things, as well as, UVU launched a campuswide adult learner initiative in 2022, and it’s strategically housed within the provost suite. It’s focused on reimagining adult education over all. We’re focusing on student support and faculty support, as well as credit for prior learning. As I said earlier, kind of getting into the mind of the adult learner. I’d really like to see more conversation in the coming year, and my goal is to have conversations around this—could we do shorter-term classwork, or more hybrid classwork, where students are on campus? Because we find there’s great value in face-to-face, what if we’re only bringing them to campus once a week and we’re hybrid twice a week for courses? Can we offer more adult learner–friendly pedagogy? What does that look like and how can we accomplish that? So, I’d like to spend more time in that space in the coming year and really listening to students of what’s working and what’s not working.
Six months into his second term, President Donald Trump has forced changes at many of the nation’s wealthiest universities, some of which have shed hundreds of jobs amid federal funding issues and investigations.
While sector layoffs are so frequent that Inside Higher Ed has dedicated monthly coverage to rounding up such reductions, those actions are more common at small, cash-strapped colleges or state institutions reeling from budget cuts. But universities with multibillion-dollar endowments have been among those making the deepest cuts in the first half of 2025, often driven by freezes on federal funding that the Trump administration imposed with minimal notice.
Some universities have also cited the recently passed endowment tax increase as a factor in layoffs.
Altogether the layoffs show a sector bracing for a new reality where research funding can be suddenly yanked away with little to no explanation and international and graduate student enrollment, once considered a cash cow, is under threat—prompting institutions in even the highest financial stratosphere to cut costs as they navigate changing policies and a president sharply critical of the sector.
Here’s a look at how the nation’s wealthiest universities are adjusting staffing levels due to an uncertain federal policy environment, research funding issues and a flurry of legal actions from the Trump administration that have forced concessions from multiple well-resourced institutions.
Thousands Out at Johns Hopkins
The Trump administration’s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development hit Johns Hopkins University with $800 million in canceled funding, prompting the Baltimore-based institution to shut down numerous international programs and lay off 2,222 employees earlier this year.
The 2,222 job cuts are the deepest announced at any institution this year.
The layoffs, announced in March, span more than 40 countries. Of the jobs cut, 1,975 were located internationally, while another 247 were in the U.S., with the majority in Baltimore. JHU announced at the time that another 107 employees would be furloughed.
Duke University, which has an endowment recently valued at nearly $12 billion, made some of the deepest cuts of the year so far when officials announced in July that 599 employees had accepted buyouts. Another 250 faculty members are reportedly weighing buyout offers as well.
Following the first round of buyouts, university officials said layoffs will begin this month.
Duke officials announced the buyouts before the Trump administration froze $108 million in federal grants and contracts and opened investigations into alleged racial discrimination, accusing the university of emphasizing diversity over merit in hiring, admissions and other practices.
Deep Cuts at Northwestern
Earlier this year, the Trump administration abruptly froze $790 million in research funding for Northwestern University, reportedly with no explanation. That action occurred at about the same time that the federal government opened an investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus.
Northwestern, which has an endowment valued at more than $14 billion, responded by eliminating 425 jobs last month in an effort to shave 5 percent off of its staff budget. The move was preceded by a hiring freeze and other cost-cutting measures announced earlier this year.
President Michael Schill and other administrators wrote in a message to campus that the cuts were “in response to more than just the federal research funding freeze.” They also pointed to “rapidly rising healthcare expenses, litigation, labor contracts, employee benefits, compliance requirements and a suite of federal changes” that may harm international student enrollment.
The Ax Falls at Stanford
Stanford University plans to cut 363 jobs beginning this fall as part of an effort to shave $140 million off the general funds budget due to financial issues connected to federal policy changes.
Those cuts come after the university announced a hiring freeze in February.
Stanford has the fourth-largest endowment among U.S. universities, recently valued at $37.6 billion. But despite its deep pockets, the private research university is feeling the squeeze from the Trump administration, with officials writing in a state regulatory filing that the university anticipates “reductions in federal research funding” and an increase in endowment taxes.
Additionally, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into admissions practices at Stanford earlier this year, accusing the university of sidestepping a ban on affirmative action.
Nearly 180 Layoffs at Columbia
Few institutions have faced as much scrutiny from the federal government in recent years as Columbia University, which agreed to sweeping changes and yielded to demands from the Trump administration to overhaul admissions, disciplinary processes and academic programs. The university will also share admissions data and reduce the number of international students it accepts in an unprecedented agreement with the Trump administration that culminated in a $221 million settlement over allegations of antisemitism tied to pro-Palestinian campus protests.
Although the Trump administration will release some frozen research funds as a condition of the settlement, choking off federal dollars has already prompted cuts. Columbia announced in May that the university had laid off nearly 180 researchers amid its standoff with the federal government.
Columbia’s endowment was recently valued at $14.7 billion.
‘A Day of Loss’ at Boston U
Boston University announced plans last month to lay off 120 workers and eliminate another 120 vacant jobs.
Officials wrote in a letter to campus that “recent and ongoing federal actions and funding cuts are affecting our research enterprise as well as day-to-day operations” and creating “uncertainty” as BU grapples with inflation, declining graduate enrollment and other challenges.
“This is a day of loss for all of us,” officials wrote. “There is no way around this. We know our community may need time to adjust to these difficult changes. Yet, it is also a necessary step in ensuring our future.”
The University of Southern California cut 55 jobs last month, according to a state regulatory filing.
Officials announced in mid-July that layoffs were underway, though they did not specify the number of employees affected. USC also implemented a hiring freeze, halted merit-based pay raises, ended some vendor contracts and pulled back on discretionary spending and travel.
Interim president Beong-Soo Kim called the layoffs “painful” in a message to campus. He cited various financial concerns, including “significant shifts in federal support for our research, hospitals, and student financial aid” as well as potential declines in international enrollment.
“The ultimate impact of these changes is difficult to predict, but for a university of our scale, the potential annual revenue loss in federally sponsored research funding alone could be $300 million or more,” Kim wrote, adding these changes came on top of a pre-existing budget deficit.
USC’s endowment was recently valued at $8.1 billion.
Unspecified Cuts at Harvard
Harvard University, which is currently locked in a legal battle with the Trump administration over alleged antisemitism and other accusations, has also laid off employees this year. Harvard Magazine reports that multiple schools have reduced staff as a result of having federal research funds frozen.
However, Harvard has not released numbers and declined to provide an estimate to Inside Higher Ed. Union officials have said that layoffs could add up to hundreds of workers.
Harvard is the nation’s wealthiest university, with an endowment valued at nearly $52 billion.
Likely Layoffs at Brown
Following Columbia, Brown University struck a deal with the Trump administration last month, agreeing to certain changes in order to restore around $510 million in frozen research funding.
The federal government closed investigations into alleged antisemitism as part of the settlement. Brown also agreed to put $50 million over the course of a decade into workforce development in Rhode Island. Less than a week after the settlement, Brown officials announced that “some layoffs will be necessary” due to the “persisting financial impact of federal actions.”
Brown also enacted a hiring freeze in March, and nearly 350 jobs remain unfilled.
University officials wrote that they expected a $30 million hit to the 2026 fiscal year budget from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump’s far-reaching legislation that affected the sector in various ways, including increases to endowment taxes and limiting or eliminating some loan programs.
More than 100 colleges and universities have already signed up for Google’s new AI for Education Accelerator.
Phiwath Jittamas/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Google’s parent company announced Wednesday that it’s planning to spend $1 billion over the next three years to help colleges teach and train students about artificial intelligence.
Google is joining other AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, in investing in AI training in higher education. All three companies have rolled out new tools aimed at supporting “deeper learning” among students and made their AI platforms available to certain students for free.
As of Wednesday, Google is making its AI Pro plan available for free to any student who is 18 years or older and lives in the United States or in Brazil, Indonesia, Japan or South Korea. That plan includes Google’s more advanced chat bot Gemini 2.5 Pro.
The $1 billion will go to “AI literacy programs, research funding and cloud computing resources,” according to the announcement. The company also is offering free AI training to every college student as part of its new Google AI for Education Accelerator. More than 100 public colleges have signed on already, the company said.
“Today’s students are the first true generation of ‘AI natives,’” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote. “They’ll use these models in ways none of us can predict, whether it’s learning things in new ways or creating new types of jobs we haven’t imagined yet. It’s still early days and there will be important questions ahead. That’s why we’re working with institutions across higher education to ensure student success.”
Forty percent of parents prefer their child attend a four-year college after high school.
Despite public skepticism about the value of a college degree, the majority of parents still want their kids to pursue more education after high school, according to a report from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation published today.
During the first two weeks of June, researchers surveyed more than 2,000 adults—including 554 parents of children under 18—about what they thought their own children or the children in their lives should do after high school. Though there was some variation depending on political party affiliation and level of educational attainment, three-quarters of parents over all say they want their children to continue their education.
“Even in this moment of skepticism around higher ed, the pull of college is still powerful for families,” Courtney Brown, Lumina’s vice president of impact and planning, told Inside Higher Ed. “The distinction is between their critiques of the system and their personal aspirations. They see there are some cracks in the system—that it’s not always affordable—and they want to make sure that if they’re going to pay for college that their child is going to see a return on investment.”
Parents had a clear preference for the type of institution their child should attend, with 40 percent of respondents indicating that their first choice would be a four-year university.
That aligns with robust data on the ROI of different degree types showing that people with bachelor’s degrees have far higher lifetime earnings and are half as likely to be unemployed than their peers with only a high school diploma.
However, not every family is convinced that a four-year degree is the best option for their child.
Another 19 percent of the parents surveyed by Gallup and Lumina said they’d prefer a two-year college and 16 percent a job training or certification program. Just 24 percent said they’d prefer their child forgo higher education altogether after high school and instead take a gap year (13 percent) join the military (5 percent) or immediately join the workforce (6 percent).
Differences in party affiliation also shaped which type of institution parents believe their kids should attend after high school. More than half (53 percent) of Democratic parents said they’d prefer their child go to a four-year college, while just a quarter of Republicans said the same; 21 percent of Republican parents said they’d prefer their child enroll at a two-year college after high school, and 22 percent said they’d prefer a job training or certificate program.
“Across the board, everyone believes you need more education after high school. But what we’re seeing now is Republicans wanting a quicker payoff for their education, and often a certification or a two-year degree leads directly to a job where they’re using those skills,” Brown said. “But that can be shortsighted when a job ends and a [worker] needs to get upskilled or reskilled.”
A four-year college education was also the preferred choice for parents with and without a college degree, though there was a considerable gap. While 58 percent of college graduates said a four-year program was their top choice for their child, only 30 percent of non–college graduates said the same.
“Parents still see that a four-year degree is the dream. It’s the degree that opens the most opportunity to getting paid more,” Brown said. “People that have gone to college see that it has paid off, whereas people who haven’t had that opportunity may feel closed out from and are uncertain that it’s going to lead to the money and jobs they’re looking for.”
The survey also asked adults without a child under 18 the same questions about what they would want a child they know—such as a nephew, niece, grandchild or family friend—to pursue after high school.
Similar to the parents surveyed, 32 percent of nonparents said they’d like to see the young people in their lives pursue a four-year degree, while 23 percent favored a two-year program and another 23 percent favored job training or a certificate program.
The University of Utah is cutting 81 offerings in response to state budget reductions and a new law.
Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images
The University of Utah plans to eliminate 81 academic programs and minors—a step that administrators attribute to a new state law that called for “strategic reinvestment” after lawmakers slashed funding to public colleges and universities.
The Republican-controlled Utah Legislature passed House Bill 265 this spring. Lawmakers cut 10 percent of institutions’ state-funded instructional budgets, but the law said they could earn back the money by cutting programs and positions and instead funding “strategic reinvestment.” Institutions’ reinvestment plans must be based on enrollment, completion rates, job placement, wages, program-level costs and local and statewide workforce demands.
Other Utah universities detailed their planned cuts in the spring, but this is the first glimpse at how the state’s flagship will respond to the new law.
The planned cuts at the University of Utah include Ph.D.s in chemical physics, physiology, experimental pathology and in theater; master’s degrees in ballet, modern dance, marketing, audiology and applied mechanics; bachelor’s degrees in chemistry teaching, Russian teaching and German teaching; certificates in public administration, veterans’ studies and computational bioimaging; various minors; and more.
Richard Preiss, president of the university’s Academic Senate, said his body’s Executive Committee reviewed the list of programs. He said that, except for one that the committee persuaded the administration to remove from the list, none had graduated more than one student in the past eight years, according to the university’s data. But a university spokesperson said that “some had zero or one, but some had up to a dozen students. Our threshold to identify inactive or low-enrollment courses was 15.”
Preiss said that while theselection process was accelerated, faculty had enough time to give meaningful input.
“These were relatively easy cuts to make and they were relatively painless,” Preiss said. “I anticipate that more painful ones are on the horizon.”
The UC system says it will “engage in dialogue with the federal administration” over grant cuts.
Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
The University of California system announced Wednesday that it would negotiate with the federal government. The response comes a day after the Department of Justice’s deadline for the institution to express its interest in finding a “voluntary resolution agreement” to the agency’s investigation into antisemitism on the University of California, Los Angeles, campus.
On the line is—according to a UC estimate—$584 million in funding that at least three different federal agencies announced they were suspending in the week between the DOJ’s July 29 letter to system officials and its Aug. 5 deadline for them to respond.
If the UC system comes to a resolution with the Trump administration, UCLA would become the first public university to openly make a deal with the federal government to restore grant funding. In the past month, Columbia and Brown Universities have agreed to collectively pay hundreds of millions of dollars to get their funding back.
In the two-paragraph statement, UC system president James B. Milliken said, “Our immediate goal is to see the $584 million in suspended and at-risk federal funding restored to the university as soon as possible,” but he argued that the “cuts do nothing to address antisemitism.”
“The extensive work that UCLA and the entire University of California have taken to combat antisemitism has apparently been ignored,” he said. “The announced cuts would be a death knell for innovative work that saves lives, grows our economy, and fortifies our national security. It is in our country’s best interest that funding be restored.”
The DOJ’s July 29 letter to the system said its months-long investigations, which remain ongoing, have so far found that UCLA violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its response to a protest encampment on its campus in the spring of 2024.
In a press release about the letter, Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “DOJ will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.” The agency said in the letter that it is prepared to sue by Sept. 2 “unless there is reasonable certainty that we can reach an agreement.”
But the Trump administration still hasn’t made clear what exactly it wants UCLA to do. Unlike with Columbia and Harvard, the federal government hasn’t listed its overarching demands. And the administration doesn’t appear to only be interested in addressing last year’s encampment at UCLA.
In their own letters to UCLA last week, the National Science Foundation and the Energy Department announced funding suspensions, citing UCLA’s failure “to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias” and saying it “endangers women by allowing men in women’s sports and private women-only spaces.” Both agencies also accused UCLA of considering race in admissions.
The Health and Human Services agency, which includes the National Institutes of Health, didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed with NIH’s grant suspension letter, and an HHS spokesperson declined to comment Wednesday. A DOJ spokesperson also declined to comment, and the White House didn’t respond to a request for comment. UC system spokespeople didn’t provide interviews or answer written questions.
UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk said in a separate statement that the institution is doing everything it can “to protect the interests of faculty, students and staff—and to defend our values and principles.”
“We will continue to hold town halls, convene office hours and share information with you, particularly those who are in the most directly affected areas,” Frenk told his employees. “This includes departments that rely on funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Department of Energy.”
The U.S. Department of Justice sued the state of Oklahoma Tuesday over a state law that allows undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates. Oklahoma is now the fourth state the DOJ has sued for having such a policy.
The state’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, swiftly sided with the federal government and filed a joint motion in support of quashing the law. He said in a statement that it’s “discriminatory and unlawful” to offer noncitizens lower in-state tuition rates “that are not made available to out-of-state Americans.”
“Today marks the end of a longstanding exploitation of Oklahoma taxpayers, who for many years have subsidized colleges and universities as they provide unlawful benefits to illegal immigrants in the form of in-state tuition,” Drummond said.
Now the state and the DOJ await a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma.
Oklahoma’s quick support for the legal challenge is reminiscent of what happened in Texas when the DOJ sued the state in June: Within hours of the lawsuit, Texas sided with the Justice Department and a judge ruled in favor of a permanent injunction, ending in-state tuition for noncitizens. The DOJ then filed similar lawsuits against Kentucky and Minnesota, though those legal fights are still ongoing.
The lawsuits follow an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in April calling for a crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities and state laws unlawfully “favoring aliens over any groups of American citizens,” citing in-state tuition benefits for noncitizens as an example.
Across the country, our schools are being taxed beyond their capacity to support educational success. We’ve known for a long time that students need a three-dimensional structure of guidance and encouragement to thrive. That’s why the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) framework was created–it’s a prevention framework for early identification of varying student needs and the responses needed to maximize academic success. In theory, an MTSS supports academic, social-emotional, and behavioral needs in equal measure. However, in practice, many schools are struggling to incorporate social-emotional and behavioral components in their MTSS–even as many of their students come to school bearing the effects of adversity, trauma, or crisis.
This imbalance is leaving millions of children behind.
Each year, at least 1 in 7 children in the United States experience abuse, violence, natural disasters, or other adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). By age 16, roughly two-thirds of children will have been exposed to at least one traumatic event. This can impair their ability to learn well and contribute to absenteeism, while secondary trauma spirals out from these students to classmates and teachers, multiplying the overall impact. Left unaddressed, the imprint of such events could warp the future of our school and public communities.
Since COVID-19, schools have reported unprecedented levels of absenteeism and student distress, and supporting trauma-exposed students without training puts more pressure on teachers, who are already burned out and leaving the profession at high rates. Therefore, it is clear to me that creating school-wide networks of trauma-informed adults is essential for fostering supportive learning and growth for students, enhancing educator capacity to nurture trauma-affected learners, and ensuring effective trauma resource management within districts.
Research has identified a supportive school community as a strong childhood protective factor against the effects of trauma. We should be hopeful about our path forward. But the vision and blueprint for this enhancement of MTSS need to come as soon as possible, and it needs to come from state-level education leaders and school district leaders.
Gaps in support and expertise
Consider this scenario: A student who recently experienced a traumatic car accident sits near a window in class, experiencing significant distress or dysregulation without outward signs. A sudden screech of tires outside activates their sympathetic nervous system (the one associated with fight or flight), and the student shuts down, withdrawing into themselves. Their teacher, unaware of the student’s trauma history and unequipped with relevant training, interprets the response as a continuation of past misbehavior or as an academic deficit.
This sort of misunderstanding takes place in a thousand places every day. I would stress that this isn’t a reflection of bad intentions, but rather a symptom of fragmented systems and knowledge. Even when trauma is recognized, lack of intentional collaboration and training often result in missed opportunities or inconsistent support, which cannot maximize recovery from trauma and may, in fact, hinder it, as research on retraumatization suggests.
There might be mismatched expectations when teachers send students to the counselor, not knowing that they themselves have a role to play in the healing. In other cases, students may be referred to a school counselor and have a productive support session–but on their way back to class, a seemingly benign statement from a third party can be misconstrued or cause dysregulation, unintentionally undoing the support they’ve received. The solution to all these problems is school-wide training on trauma-informed skills. This way, all educators and staff alike develop a shared knowledge, understanding, language, and responses as they collaborate and connect with students. With the right tools, adults on campus have better trauma-informed strategies to use in their relationships with students and in building a safe and supportive school community.
The proof is all around us
Trauma training works synergistically within MTSS: social-emotional and trauma-responsive support allows for better academic outcomes, which work to further reduce behavioral problems, and so on. At the Center for Safe & Resilient Schools and Workplaces, we see this play out often with our school district partners. For example, at Pasadena Unified School District, which was recently ravaged by the Eaton Canyon Fire, trauma-informed best practices and preparations have enabled district leaders to reopen schools with sufficient psychological understanding and interventions along with the needed material support for the 10,000 students who were affected.
A truly effective MTSS model does not treat trauma as a peripheral concern. It integrates trauma-responsive strategies into every tier of support–from universal practices, to targeted interventions, to intensive mental health services. In that environment, every adult who comes in contact with students has the training to adhere to trauma best practices.
We are at a juncture where the impact of trauma poses serious risks to the education system, but evidence-based approaches exist to solve the problem. Change from the state level down is the best way to transform school cultures quickly, and I urge state education leaders to take action. Any MTSS plan isn’t complete without a trauma-informed foundation, lens, and programming. And our students–each and every one–deserve nothing less.
Vivien Villaverde, USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work
Vivien Villaverde is an associate professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and an EdD candidate at Rossier School of Education. She is the Co-Founder and Vice President of the Center for Safe and Resilient Schools and Workplaces. Prof. Villaverde is an approved national trainer for TISE, Psychological First Aid-TEACH, STAT, SSET, and Bounce Back. She supports various projects to build trauma-focused and multi-tiered infrastructure, has contributed to leading publications and research journals, and has delivered presentations in national and international conferences on trauma practices and evidence-based interventions, disaster preparedness and planning.
Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all)
Yet underneath those challenges lies another, less headline-grabbing danger: delayed upkeep and repairs to infrastructure and assets.
More on the Survey
Inside Higher Ed’s 15th annual Survey of College and University Chief Business Officers was conducted by Hanover Research. The survey included 169 chief business officers, mostly from public and private nonprofit institutions, for a margin of error of 7 percent. The response rate was 7 percent. A copy of the free report can be downloaded here.
On Wednesday, Aug. 20, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed will present a free webcast to discuss the results of the survey, with experts who can answer your most pressing questions about higher education finance—including how to plan effectively amid the current financial and policy uncertainty. Register here.
One in three surveyed CBOs (36 percent) identified infrastructure/deferred maintenance costs as a top financial risk to their institution, just behind state and/or federal policy changes—and ahead of options such as technology investment requirements, increased market competition (including from alternative credential providers), potential changes to international student enrollment and changes in student athletics revenue and name, image and likeness deals.
Most CBOs also say they’re at least moderately concerned about their institution’s ability to fund deferred maintenance and facility needs, with 11 percent extremely concerned and another quarter (25 percent) very concerned.
How bad is the problem? Just 1 percent of institutions represented were on track to fund no deferred maintenance in the then-current fiscal year (the survey was live in April and May). But another 63 percent were only poised to fund up to a quarter of identified needs. This is consistent across public and private nonprofit institutions.
By institution type, public doctoral university CBOs were most likely to report funding a quarter or less, at 89 percent. Community college CBOs were least likely to report this, at 44 percent. Still, just about a third of community college CBOs expected their institution to fund more than half of identified needs.
Across higher education, deferred maintenance needs span aging HVAC systems, roofs and dorms; buildings in need of rewiring; and more. Technical deferred maintenance, such as addressing choppy Wi-Fi, is another concern. These aren’t the flashy projects that attract donors or drive capital campaigns (exceptions notwithstanding). But they matter in terms of curb appeal and functionality. Prospective students notice the state of facilities. Dingy classrooms and buildings are current students’ learning and living conditions, and employees’ working conditions. Deferred maintenance may translate to safety or accessibility issues (think sidewalks and elevators). And problems only compound over time, meaning deferred maintenance can—and does—escalate to larger, costlier repairs.
Richard G. Mills Jr., president and CEO of United Educators, a liability insurance and risk management services provider, said that underfunding depreciation has “long been in the bag of tools that institutions will turn to in times of financial stress.” It’s never been a “great practice,” he continued, “but I understand why it happens, and there is even an argument that in the past era of growth—in endowments, tuition, philanthropy and student population—it wasn’t an outlandish way to approach what were largely temporary downturns.”
Now all that has changed, said Mills, a former college chief administrative, business and operating officer: “The forward environment is unlikely to be one of growth,” with philanthropy, tuition revenue and student populations “certain to remain flat or decline for some time.”
In this light, using deferred maintenance as a tool is simply delaying an expense whose cost is likely to compound at a significant rate, he added.
Ruth Johnston, vice president of consulting for the National Association of College and University Business Officers, agreed that deferred maintenance “is a very big and growing issue for universities and colleges and has been for many years.”
Public colleges and universities are often hardest hit, Johnston said, as state legislators “prefer to fund new capital projects over providing funds for the less glamorous options of deferred maintenance.” And unless universities and colleges “intentionally create budgets, and consistently add funds to them, they don’t prioritize deferred maintenance and often only pay for emergency needs.”
The shiny-object phenomenon isn’t exclusive to public institutions. Mills recalled, for example, how a dean at a private institution once said he wasn’t worried about underfunding because when major renewal was required, “he would simply run a capital campaign to build a new building.”
In addition to the findings on deferred maintenance, the survey also suggests that some institutions are rethinking their physical campuses amid shifting enrollment and study trends. About two in five respondents (41 percent) report that their institution is retaining its current physical campus footprint but investing in renovations. Another 34 percent report targeted expansion, or moderate growth in specific areas. But relatively few CBOs report either strategic downsizing or significant expansion.
Deferred maintenance expenses can sometimes be bundled into other project budgets. But uncertainty and other factors are slowing or halting even capital spending on many campuses—even if strategic downsizing isn’t yet a major trend.
Seth Odell, founder of Kanahoma, an education marketing agency, underscored the gravity of the deferred maintenance backlog, saying it “feels like it’s a part of a broader death spiral many institutions have found themselves in.”
“We often treat deferred maintenance as a facilities or finance issue, but it’s increasingly a strategic enrollment risk—and one that’s compounding year over year,” he said. “I’ve worked with institutions where students are literally walking past shuttered buildings on campus tours, or sweating through admitted-student events due to outdated HVAC systems. In a competitive enrollment environment, these realities are no longer just aesthetic. They’re affecting yield.”
Compounding Problems, (Radical) Solutions
Even before it downgraded its higher education outlook in March due to federal policy uncertainty, Moody’s Ratings had warned that a “large and growing backlog of capital needs posed a significant credit risk for the higher education sector.” In a report last summer, Moody’s said that $750 billion to $950 billion of spending would be needed over the next decade for just its approximately 500 rated colleges and universities to make “significant headway toward reducing deferred maintenance, upgrading facilities and building the new projects that are critical to strategic positioning.”
“Colleges and universities that are unable to offer updated facilities, advanced technology and an attractive physical environment risk losing competitive standing,” Moody’s said at the time.
Construction cost data firm Gordian documented in its most recent “State of Facilities in Higher Education” report “ongoing curtailment of campus expansions as institutions take stock of what they will really need to own and operate,” plus shortfalls in the funding of needed campus renewal investments of more than 32 percent. It valued the backlog of capital renewal needs at over $140 per gross square foot.
The situation isn’t likely to improve anytime soon. Emily Raimes, associate managing director at Moody’s, told Inside Higher Ed that amid growing economic and policy uncertainty, “many institutions are adopting a more cautious approach to financial planning. This shift in strategy may lead to a deceleration or postponement of capital investment initiatives.”
Shrinking the footprint of a college campus is a real opportunity for colleges and universities to move forward and save money.”
—Consultant John Woell
F. King Alexander, who served as president of Louisiana State University from 2013 to 2020, said that deferred maintenance needs increased $30 million per year at the Baton Rouge campus alone during his tenure. The university “cobbled” together only about $8 to $10 million annually to address emergency issues, he said, so the problem still grew by about $20 million annually “despite what we were able to do.”
“We used a lot of duct tape,” he said.
Louisiana last year passed legislation designed to fund deferred maintenance and capital improvements at state institutions. It will take years and consistent support to tackle the state’s $2 billion backlog.
Alexander, now a professor of educational leadership at Florida Gulf Coast University, is currently involved in an ongoing national study that draws on the insights of chief community college financial officers. Based on that research, completed with colleagues at the University of Alabama’s Education Policy Center, only “marginal” progress has been made in facilities since 2007, as institutions “still have the same needs, the same backlogs, the same increases in maintenance and the same lack of planning,” he said. In 2024, the largest areas of deferred maintenance and facility problems for community colleges included science labs, classroom spaces and computer labs.
“States have consistently shifted their deferred maintenance costs from state government to the public colleges and universities over the last three decades,” Alexander said. “In other words, to student tuition and fees.”
Odell described deferred maintenance as “both a symptom and an accelerant of the bigger financial reckoning” now facing higher education.
For tuition-dependent institutions especially, he added, “it’s a vicious cycle. Declining enrollment leads to reduced revenue, which leads to deferred investments, which in turn erode the very experience that drives enrollment.”
Odell did note some “success stories,” including Southern New Hampshire University, which has been able to work somewhat in reverse, “using surplus generated from online enrollment growth to completely revamp and reimagine their campus experience.”
Among other strategies, the consultancy EAB recommends that campus leaders create maintenance endowments that will support a building’s “true needs” across its life cycle—not just construction.
John Woell, principal at Manitou Passage Consultancy, offered his own suite of suggestions—some of them unconventional: replacing faculty and staff offices with more flexible workspace arrangements, known as “hoteling”; being clear about needs, including how each campus space supports the college’s mission; and ending gifts in perpetuity by pivoting to “sponsorships.”
“If a gift pays to build a space that has a likely useful life span of 50 years, allow renaming at the end of the 50 years.”
Bigger picture, Woell said, “Shrinking the footprint of a college campus is a real opportunity for colleges and universities to move forward and save money.”
Alexander agreed that campus-based solutions such as rethinking physical spaces and even downsizing make sense where enrollment is not growing. But he stressed the importance of public investment in higher education—including more reliable state funding for deferred maintenance expenses at public institutions.
“This is a huge issue that presidents have to deal with that nobody’s talking about.”
